Drawing the line on tax breaks

The top 1 percent now controls more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. Not enough!

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In 2007, the top 1 percent of U.S. income earners made 23.5 percent of all income — more than the bottom 50 percent combined. Not enough! The share of income going to the top 1 percent has nearly tripled since the mid-1970s. Not enough! Eighty percent of all new income earned from 1980 to 2005 has gone to the top 1 percent. Not enough!

Wall Street executives, with their obscene compensation packages, now earn more than they did before we bailed them out. Not enough! With the middle class collapsing and the rich getting richer, the United States now has by far the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of any major country on earth. Not enough!

The very rich want more, more, more, and they are prepared to dismantle the existing political and social order to get it. During the midterm campaign, as a result of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, billionaires were able to pour hundreds of millions of dollars of secret money into the campaign — helping to elect dozens of members of Congress.

Now, having made their investment, they want their congressional employees to produce. Republicans in Congress, needless to say, are all on board. The issue is whether a Democratic president and Senate will go along to get along. Or will they draw a clear line at protecting the interests of the middle class and other, more vulnerable populations while tackling our economic and budgetary problems in earnest?

Despite Republicans’ loud rhetoric about the “deficit crisis,” the GOP now wants to add $700 billion to the national debt over the next 10 years — by extending the Bush tax breaks for the top 2 percent of earners. Families who earn $1 million a year or more would receive, on average, a tax break of $100,000 a year.

Republicans also want to eliminate or significantly reduce the estate tax, which has existed since 1916. Its elimination would add, over 10 years, about $1 trillion to our national debt.

All benefits would go to the top 0.3 percent. More than 99.7 percent of families would not gain a nickel. But Walmart’s Walton family would receive an estimated tax break of more than $30 billion if the estate tax were repealed.